Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

vapour + -ous

Examples

If I had taken mercury and converted it into vapor (as I could easily do), I should have a perfectly colorless vapor; for you must understand this about vapors, that bodies in what we call the vaporous or the gaseous state are always perfectly transparent, never cloudy or smoky; they are, however, often colored, and we can frequently have colored vapors or gases produced by colorless particles themselves mixing together, as in this case [the lecturer here inverted a glass cylinder full of binoxide of nitrogen (2) over a cylinder of oxygen, when the dark red vapor of hyponitrous acid was produced].

Even far below the critical temperature the molecules have an enormous degree of activity, and tend to fly asunder, maintaining what appears to be a gaseous, but what technically is called a vaporous, condition -- the distinction being that pressure alone suffices to reduce the vapor to the liquid state.

Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic," coming from a "fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown westward," sucking up on its way "all that was most unwholesome from the soil of France."

His "Cloud Collector's Handbook" is a portable adjunct to his society's website, addressed to anyone who spends time gazing at the sky, more or less idly, wondering about the names or nature of its vaporous denizens.

Bassett, with his own eyes, saw colour and colours transform into sound till the whole visible surface of the vast sphere was a-crawl and titillant and vaporous with what he could not tell was colour or was sound.